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Dave Scrivano, president and CEO of Little Caesars Pizza, said last week: "I really believe this will be the biggest product introduction in the company's history." He's at the test kitchen in Comerica Park. / Kathleen Galligan/Detroit Free Press

More than two years of testing have gone into the new product. / Kathleen Galligan/Detroit Free Press

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For Michigan folks, an upgrade of a traditional Detroit-style pan pizza -- square pie, crunchy outer crust, chewy in the middle -- may not seem like an earthshaking event.

But to Dave Scrivano, president and CEO of Little Caesars Pizza, Monday's nationwide rollout of the new Deep!Deep! Dish pizza product is huge. Gigantic. Colossal.

"I really believe this will be the biggest product introduction in the company's history," Scrivano said last week, as he gave me an advance taste of the new pies and a sneak peek at Little Caesars' new research kitchen tucked inside the Comerica Park baseball stadium.

For a company that coined the "Pizza!Pizza!" catch phrase in 1979 and established itself as the industry's value leader with Hot-N-Ready $5 pizzas in 2004, Scrivano's biggest-ever declaration for Monday's rollout may seem like a stretch.

Most people in places like New York, Texas and even Great Lakes neighbor Chicago, however, are hardly even familiar with the Detroit-style pan pies currently offered by Little Caesars and competitors like Buddy's in Michigan. So maybe the Deep!Deep! Dish debut and rollout in all of the nation's nearly 4,000 Little Caesars outlets really will be a big deal outside the Big Mitten.

While most Little Caesars stores in Michigan have offered $7 Hot-N-Ready deep dish pepperoni pies for years, only 5% of Little Caesars stores nationwide have had deep-dish on the menu. And only 1% of all Little Caesars pizzas sold in the U.S. were deep dish, Scrivano said -- until this week, anyway.

OK, what's really brand new about the new Deep!Deep! Dish?

Several things:

• More crunchy corner pieces. Instead of one square pie with four corner pieces, each box of Deep!Deep! Dish will come with two separate pies baked in a new custom pan, yielding eight corner pieces with more crunchy outer crust.

• A slightly thicker crust, with improved dough formulation for more consistency.

• A new rectangular box.

• More pizza, about 10% more than in the previous Hot-N-Ready deep-dish option.

• A higher price, $8 instead of $7, as a result.

"We wanted to offer a premium product option, while still retaining value for the customer," Scrivano said.

A 30-second TV advertising spot made for the launch features three astronaut-scientists so amazed by the pizza's "caramelized cheese crust" that they shrunk themselves down to study it in a fly-by with their mini-spaceship.

In early focus groups and test-marketing, he added, 96% of consumers said they loved or liked the new Deep!Deep! Dish product, and nine out of 10 said they would order it again or recommend it to a friend.

Little Caesars has recently doubled the size of its research and development staff to 20 people after hiring Dana Tilly as R&D vice president in late 2011, and created a new -- and top-secret until now -- innovation center and test kitchen inside Comerica Park, across Woodward Avenue from Little Caesars headquarters in the Fox Theatre building.

The company came up with a new baking pan design to cook the twin deep-dish pies at once, and contracted with Chicago Metallic, a metal fabricating outfit in Humboldt, Tenn., to make hundreds of thousands of the pans for Little Caesars outlets across the country.

Scrivano said the pan maker went from having some workers on layoff to running the plant three shifts a day, six days a week for a couple months to meet initial demand.

Scrivano said he believes Little Caesars is playing into a growing awareness and curiosity about the Detroit deep-dish pan pizza approach, noting that recent studies and an article in GQ magazine have mentioned Detroit-style pan pizzas favorably, in comparison with other approaches such as Chicago-style deep-dish pizzas that are mostly round and often have stuffed crusts.

If Scrivano is right about the Deep!Deep! Dish product rollout turning into a big deal nationwide, the Detroit-based pizza company founded in 1959 by Mike and Marian Ilitch stands to extend its five-year run as the fastest-growing pizza chain in the nation.